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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (49806)	10/6/2002 5:04:39 PM
From: spiral3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

so 9% of Palestinian victims are children and 6% of Israeli victims are children. of course this decontextualizes things a bit, being that I'd imagine that most Israeli children under 15 don't hang out in bars etc, you may or may not want to check this out, but whatever.

To: Noel de Leon who wrote (49806)	10/6/2002 5:17:19 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Ive seen numbers like this: 120 Palestinian children under 15, 31 Israeli children under 15 as of July 2002. I haven't seen those numbers, and the Israeli numbers seem low, considering the the number of suicide bombers who targeted young children at restaurants, ice cream parlors and busstops. But it might be close to right. Also, the Israelis don't use children under 15 as combatants; the Palestinians do. That must be considered in the totals. There are many cases, especially in the beginning of the intifada, where the shabab (consisting of young teenage boys) threw stones, backed up by Tanzim gunmen. The aim of the exercise was to get some of the boys killed; the boys were all psyched up for martyrdom. In fact, the PA ran ads on TV for boys to become martyrs for the cause, showing the dead 12 year-old Mohammed al Dura (who btw, was shot by other Palestinians) exhorting the boys of Palestine to join him in Paradise. Paradise was very pretty; it had green fields and boys flying kites. They also taught boys in school that martyrdom was the highest and noblest achievement possible. I remember reading one story in early 2001 of a Palestinian-American who had moved from Detroit to Ramallah in 1995, but who decided to move back to Detroit on the day her eight year-old son came home from school saying, "Mom, when I grow up I want to become a shaheed [martyr]." Usually, breakouts of Palestinian figures class the deaths of teenage stone-throwers as "doubtful", not "combatants", since it's judged excessive force if the Israelis shot one of a group of boys who were throwing stones, but not excessive if those boys were backed by gunmen shooting at the Israelis. Both cases have happened often in this intifada.